Hiking...

I went hiking the other day in Whipporwhill and Glazier parks in the 'qua...I can remember being in the second grade playing tag in there....and a few years later getting thrown into the water by dad and his drunk freinds...those houses are gone...development...but the spirit lives on...

Walk Me Out in the Morning Dew...

walk me out in the morning dew...the light slanted so beautifully this morning in the Greeley Woods around right in the morning...I was having thoughts of what it would mean to take pictures of a beautiful young woman lying naked in that shaft of light...nothing overtly sexual...just a celebration of their beauty...I was having that thought I saw two does who apparently are living down there these days...i've seen the does also over the wetlands at the Temple...perhaps they like to get their drinking water there...so the light was glistening off the morning dew and it combined to make a nice effect with the song of the birds...

Economic Model...

The business model that has dominated the British and American economies since the 1960s, and been propagated worldwide, crashed because it is inherently unstable. It works in only one direction, to take value away from the real economy and give it to stockholders and bankers. It’s an asset-stripping system that benefits company managers and directors, bankers, stock traders and financiers. To workers and their families, who in the past believed that they had a stake in the business economy, and to the communities suffering de-industrialization, it said, “Too bad, but you’ll be better off in the long term—if you are still around.”

The Great Seal...

The Great Seal is, in fact, a graphic representation of "the idea of America," from its birth. It should be exhumed from the depths of the psyche and displayed on the walls of every classroom. It should certainly appear in the background of all of the Kim Il-Sung-style worship of that savage murderer and torturer Ronald Reagan, who blissfully described himself as the leader of a "shining city on the hill," while orchestrating some of the more ghastly crimes of his years in office, notoriously in Central America but elsewhere as well.

Confuse...

Occasionally the conflict between "what we stand for" and "what we do" has been forthrightly addressed. One distinguished scholar who undertook the task at hand was Hans Morgenthau, a founder of realist international relations theory. In a classic study published in 1964 in the glow of Camelot, Morgenthau developed the standard view that the U.S. has a "transcendent purpose": establishing peace and freedom at home and indeed everywhere, since "the arena within which the United States must defend and promote its purpose has become world-wide." But as a scrupulous scholar, he also recognized that the historical record was radically inconsistent with that "transcendent purpose."

We should not be misled by that discrepancy, advised Morgenthau; we should not "confound the abuse of reality with reality itself." Reality is the unachieved "national purpose" revealed by "the evidence of history as our minds reflect it." What actually happened was merely the "abuse of reality."

Thinking like a consumer...

Thinking like a consumer, and finding out how your potential clients are searching for information, gives you a valuable advantage over your online competition. Sprinkling your articles and blog posts with the right keywords will help you attract interested visitors to your site… and convert them into paying clients.

Journalism...

From Josh Marshall...

There was no mention of MoDowd. Instead, Josh Marshall, speaking at Columbia’s Journalism Day ceremony this morning, exhorted journalists entering and re-entering the field to consider not only what they can do to shape journalism in the future—but also to re-imagine it entirely. “It’s one thing to write a great novel,” Marshall said. “But it’s even better to invent the novel.”

Despite the financial and, perhaps, existential crisis journalism is facing (“you don’t have to look very hard for Cassandras saying it’s a dying business,” Marshall noted)—and also because of those crises—“there’s no time…that I would rather enter the profession than right now,” Marshall said. “It’s the people entering the profession now who are going to create the publishing models, the business models, that are going to shape journalism in the 21st century.”

Marshall, whose Talking Points Memo revolutionized the concept of online reporting, devoted much of his talk to extolling the creative potential of critical thinking. We “need to pay critical attention to everything,” he said—to question assumptions about journalism, and to consider, in particular, what is a core necessity of journalism, and what about journalistic practice is contingent. “So many things that we do,” he said, we do out of mere habit—because we’ve systematized accidents of history.

We need to bring a critical sensibility not only to our thinking about the journalism, Marshall suggested, but to journalism itself. We need to foster forms of journalism—and build publishing models—that, in turn, foster the “constant process of re-examination that is absolutely critical to our own work.”

We also need to embrace, rather than question, the notion of audience engagement. “In this period of not only rebuilding the practice of journalism, but what sustains it, our compass really has to be what can find an audience,” Marshall said. Just as journalists have had a tendency, he noted, “to measure our seriousness as journalists by our indifference to the publishing and business side of the operations that sustain what we do,” we’ve also adopted a kind of principled indifference to the audience itself. Yet people “who are so focused on their journalism—so focused on their stories,” Marshall said, deprive themselves and their audiences of the engagement that is, and must be recognized as being, the core of the journalistic mission.

“Building audience, and engaging readers, is the fundamental test of what you do” as journalists, Marshall said. News stories—and journalism more generally—must reflect that dynamic relationship. “This isn’t writing the definitive Hittite dictionary that can sit on its own in the library,” he said, to the audience’s laughter. Discrete news stories, rather, are organic entities—and the publishing and business models that will emerge to sustain them need to reflect that.

Marshall singled out for criticism the kind of ‘he said/she said’ journalism that, no matter how often it’s decried by media critics and the general public, is still alive and well in reporting. “One of the great failings of journalism has been the tendency to emphasize balance over accuracy,” Marshall said. Reporters’ “excessive regard for balance” positions journalism not with, but against, “the core of what sustains it: a fundamental honesty with readers.”

The good news is that “the more balkanized and diverse period that we’re going into,” Marshall said, fosters that honesty. While media consolidation encouraged the notion of balance—large news organizations, he noted, “had to be appealing to everybody, all the time”—the Web’s toppling of barriers means that “you can have a much more healthy ecosystem of different news organizations.” And those organizations, in turn, can feel liberated to turn the equation around: to emphasize accuracy—which is to say, honesty—over balance.

But that liberation will require journalistic institutions to engage in the hard work of self-reinvention—so that, first and foremost, they can live long enough to enjoy the freedom. “He not busy being born,” Marshall concluded, quoting Bob Dylan, “is busy dying.”

Decline of Newspapers...

A newspaper is a package of content—politics, sport, share prices, weather and so forth—which exists to attract eyeballs to advertisements. Unfortunately for newspapers, the internet is better at delivering some of that than paper is. It is easier to search through job and property listings on the web, so classified advertising and its associated revenue is migrating onto the internet. Some content, too, works better on the internet—news and share prices can be more frequently updated, weather can be more geographically specific—so readers are migrating too. The package is thus being picked apart.

The newspaper’s decline is both cause and effect of the worrying finding by the Pew Centre that the number of Americans aged 18-24 who got any news at all the previous day has dropped from 34% to 25% over the past ten years. But that figure may be less troubling than it looks. Because newspapers pack together all sorts of different content, many of those who claimed in the past to have seen some news probably did so for a few seconds before turning the page to the sports scores. Acquaintance as shallow as that with the news is probably no great loss to society; Pew surveys of general knowledge suggest that young people are about as well (or badly) informed as they used to be.

And the newspaper companies’ tribulations do not necessarily presage the demise of the news business, for they stem in part from the tumultuous and expensive transition from paper to electronic distribution. News organisations are currently bearing two sets of costs—those of printing and distributing their product for the old world, and providing digital versions for the new—even though they have yet to find a business model that works online.

Up to now, most have been offering their content free online, but that is unsustainable, because there isn’t enough advertising revenue online to pay for it. So either the amount of news produced must shrink, or readers must pay more. Some publications, such as the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, which has more than 1m online subscribers and has just promised to develop a new system of micropayments for articles, already charge for content. Others will follow: Rupert Murdoch, the Journal’s owner, has said he expects his other titles to start charging too. With news available free on Google and Yahoo!, readers may, of course, not be prepared to pay even for deeper or more specialised stuff; but since they do in the paper world, where free-sheets and paid-for publications coexist, there seems no reason why they wouldn’t online.

Better mobile devices may encourage them to do so. Apple’s iPhone is the first reader-friendly mobile phone, and the latest update to its software, due shortly, will enable news providers that currently give away content on the iPhone to start charging for it. Amazon has just unveiled a new, larger version of the Kindle, its e-book reader, better suited to displaying newspapers. Similar devices are available from other firms, with many more on the way. Better technology coupled with new payment systems will not solve the acute problems faced by newspapers today, but should eventually provide new models to enable news to flourish in the digital age.

And already, there are signs that it will (see article). New sources of news are proliferating online. Many, it is true, are unreliable. Most are badly funded. Some are the rantings of deranged extremists. But some—like Muckety, an American site which enriches news stories with interactive maps of the protagonists’ networks of influence, and NightJack, the revealing and depressing blog of an anonymous British policeman, which won the Orwell prize last month—enhance society’s understanding of itself, and could not have existed in the old world.

But the only certainty about the future of news is that it will be different from the past. It will no longer be dominated by a few big titles whose front pages determine the story of the day. Public opinion will, rather, be shaped by thousands of different voices, with as many different focuses and points of view. As a result, people will have less in common to chat about around the water-cooler. Those who are not interested in political or economic news will be less likely to come across it; but those who are will be better equipped to hold their rulers to account. Which is, after all, what society needs news for.

The Ride To Rockwood...

5.15.09 Part I
Rockwood on a beautiful spring day
the sound of the birds remain
when there is no story
left to say
when the nerves explode raw
from the nights spinning
in the dread
it's the music of the railroad
that calms the head
sirens in the distance
the man attending to some
problem
khaki suits walking on the path
telling jokes of watercooler humor
as I watch
detach
far from the path
camera in hand
smoke in mouth
one more day like esau
on the land
chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp
go the birds
mixed with the sound of the jet
above
modern man so busy to consume
got everyone locked up in a
plastic hand
soon the gorge will be gone
another slice of image vanished
banished in the air
Part II
the mysteries of Rockwood
the holy spirit

Spring Is Here...

spring is here...the woods has given up its pearly gems...pregnant breeze wafts through the air...smell of thick woods...on the cable station, the westchester county legislature...going through the motions...inside joke...the story of america...at least at this moment from this perspective...the kids go tap tap tap on their cellphones just the way the powers to be want it...they don't want people really know what's going on, now do they?...breeze through thick leaf makes the thick water fall of the leaf...on facebook the grown ups that know each other talk about gossip from thirty years ago...i suppose that's cool but I would rather write and produce art in the moment...after all, spring...in the here...now...

Disposable Media..

Most people consume media in a disposable manner even though they want to own it.

Spring Now...

Spring now...the leaves return...like the cliches used to evoke rebirth and all that shit...I'm not going into that here...to me, it's just a culmination of a year of taking pictures of the woods in the back...it was vital this year because I was able to get the winter which I had lost last year when the hard drive failed...so now I have a complete cycle of the changes in the landscape and light...yeah, right madness...for sure, you're right...but the beauty and this is no cliche that I experience from this is immense and it's my beauty, within me, not dependent on anyone and not needed to share with anyone...why write?...the process of putting down words makes it REALER FOR ME and just that more precsious....I think I'm done being bitter about friends not appreciating what I do for them which is a big relief and I'm done about no one giving a shit about the show or the websites...they are my jewels and as I wrote decades ago, they are aquaducts to my being so I am stepping out of the clown role folks...I am going to enjoy the fact that I have an unbelievable memory and that I can sustain concentration memory...I have no control over the lack of focus individuals in this world exhibit and I have no control over a world addicted to image and celebrity but I do have control over my expression such as the juxtapositioin I can create by posting pictures from the winter..

as you see the contrast is vivid and in that juxtaposition comes a great aesthetic truth...
yep, big thoughts I know...who needs them?...I'm sounding like a two bit southern preacher out of an Eudora Welty or Flannery 0'Connor short story and others who point the finger and stepping into the rhetorical mode of you and pointing out what's wrong with you so I hope to get away from that..I've got nothing to point out...the minute I do so I lose the zen like the cool breeze that is blowing on this here Mother's day and the magic of the light that dances on the now pregnant forest...

John Doe and the Sadies...

John Doe demonstrates repeatedly his diversity in style. In his performance with The Sadies at The City Winery in lower Manhattan on May 6, 2009 John Doe exhibited his virtuosity with the country idiom.

horace greeley in the 'qua...

watching an actor portray horace greeley,,,

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Wisdowm of Crowds...

The web, with its low barrier to entry and permeable social boundaries, is the ultimate medium through which to explore the finer points of the wisdom of crowds. You’re surrounded by online examples: Google’s search results. BitTorrent. The “Most E-mailed” stories on your favorite news site. Each is powered by wisdom gleaned from crowds online.

Pictures of Yoga...

I was able to get new pictures of Diann's class the other day...the week before I had thrown my back out and haven't been able to particiapate in the class...I've been doing some work for Diann so I showed up to say I would meet her after class....she noticed I had the camera and asked me if I was going to take pictures. I hadn't thought of it but it seemed like the perfect opportunity so I went for it....it's a privilege to be able to stand in there and take the pictures...it was also an interesting perspective to view a class...